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FOR MEN, the “Boobie Flask” (a real invention, soon to be for sale online) combines two (or should that be three?) of the all-time great objects of desire. For women, the liquid-fillable bra’s an opportunity to sneak some of the strong stuff into football games (or movie theaters, or business meetings). Its female inventor probably wouldn’t mind if you made up your own “nip” puns.
ONE OF THE FEW intelligent conservative publications out there, The World & I (founded by pals of Unification Church honcho Sun Myung Moon), has a long, intriguing essay about “The Feminization of American Culture.” The writer, Leonard Sax, implies a connection between the rise of feminine values and a rise in “environmental estrogen,” due to chemical leakoffs from all the plastic products lying around our homes and landfills.
I’d already heard about the latter phenomenon in a Hugo House lecture a couple years ago by Olympia postcard designer Stella Marrs. Marrs didn’t think the pervasiveness of estrogen-like chemicals was a good thing, for women or anybody. Recent medical disputes about the long-term effects of (deliberate) estrogen therapy regimens, such as a possible increased breast-cancer risk, might back her up on this.
Which brings me to the good friend of mine who’s studied a lot about the Greek Amazons, warriors of legend who would undergo masectomies to gain better bow-and-arrow skills. Are the women of the industrialized world, Sax’s article asks, gaining more dominance at the expense of their own health?
GET READY FOR the mother of all gender-bias lawsuits. Tens of thousands of potential class-action defendants at 3,500 job sites, litigation that could drag on as long as 13 years, and one creepy happy-face logo.
…MEANWHILE, the US rich-poor gap is at its highest since ’29.
…in rural Eastern Washington can be found today at the unlikely spot of SexNewsDaily.com. Scroll about halfway down the hereby-linked page to find the memories of one “Larry K.” concerning the girls he knew back home, who drank and cavorted like rebel girls everywhere but who disdained abortion or even contraception—because they saw what used to be called the “shotgun wedding” as a path to an at least marginally-better existence.
Mr. K also chides college-grad feminists for not seriously considering the plight of the non-affluent:
“To lower class women the world doesn’t look like patriarchy; it looks like it’s run by a class of women and men who run it to their own advantage.… Feminism failed because it failed to seriously consider the fears of the mass of women who don’t have many options.”
I also see the world, or at least the non-Moslem world, as controlled by “a class of women and men who run it to their own advantage.”
White affluent women are the second most privileged class in this country. It’s not surprising for such a woman to see only affluent men above her socioeconomically, and then to perceive the whole of society as “The Patriarchy.”
I’m not denouncing such women. It’s easy to fall into limited perspectives. It’s harder to imagine life from somebody else’s point of view.
But it’s vital.
UPDATE: The oh-so-long-awaited new-look print MISC will finally, knock on Formica, be out starting this Tuesday at select sales outlets around town. Subscribers should get it by the end of the week.
SOME MAGAZINES are so desperate to fill their pages with sex-related texts, they end up hyping alleged “trends,” sometimes contradictory, sometimes in the same issue.
Case in point: New York mag, which in a recent issue declares NYC young-marrieds to be a stress-defeated “Generation Sexless,” yet also proclaims a new upsurge in casual sex thanks to online dating services giving women more anonymity and power within such situations.
OK OK, less married sex and more unmarried sex aren’t contradictory. Except another story in the mag claims more NY-ers now want to marry and are having less casual sex.
Meanwhile, USA Today claims to have discovered a vast trend of listless middle-aged husbands, incapable of satisfying wives who came of age in the sex-lib ’70s and who still want it as often as possible.
Confused? Hey, it’s an innately confusing topic to begin with. Live w/it.
Or maybe it’s not so confusing, if you try to wrap it all into a meta-trend.
Say, a grossly overgeneralized meta-trend of Women Who Want It All, or at least as much of It as can fit around other weekly tasks; facing dudes who can’t be the Sole Breadwinner anymore (and are often not winning any bread right now), who don’t know what role to play opposite assertive women, and some of whom (particularly in art-and-media cities) might feel intimidated by some of the “cute” and “funny” wholesale male bashing in contemporary pop-cult.
This ties in, tangentally, with this site’s “Peepees for Peace” campaign, advocating the deployment of passionate male energy in the quest toward a better world for all. This call for a metaphoric rebalancing in the public sphere can easily equate with a need for more literal rebalancing in the private sphere.
I’m not advocating male superiority but male equality. As John Cusak’s platonic ladyfriend says in Say Anything, “There are millions of guys. Be a man.”
This country needs men.
Not the prepubescent schoolyard bullies of the political right.
Not the self-emasculated gender-guilt trippers of the political left.
Not the bumbling dads and incompetent husbands of the sitcoms.
Not the Pavlovian dorks of Maxim and The Best Damn Sports Show Period.
We need men who are equally eager to learn how to rebuild a dying economy and to learn how to lick clit. Who can create both new opportunities and new fantasy-role games.
We need more of the positive masculine qualities of bravery, responsibility, zeal, intelligence, and perserverence; at home and in the outside world. (The fact that juxtaposing the words “positive” and “masculine” is so rare in alt-culture, even a seeming oxymoron, is but another symptom of our problem.)
We need men who are confident enough to work and live alongside strong women, neither as master nor as slave. Men who can give women the kind of attentive, soul-meshing love neither vibrators nor blue pills can give by themselves.
Such men are made, not born. How to make them? I wish I knew.
…asking men to put the fullness of their yangness to work for a better world: Maggie Tapert, a US-born sex therapist now based in Zurich, offers a pro-peace essay, Prescription Pleasure. In it, she speaks out in favor of sexual self-empowerment for women as an antidote to a culture of violence and repression. But (unlike many of her colleagues in the “sex positive” movement) she also prescribes a similar path for men:
“Imagine for a moment that you could sit on the market place lovingly stroking a beautiful hard cock and all the men and women who walked by would admire it, or maybe lovingly stroke or touch it, sprinkle it with holy water or even just smile, nod and go on about their business. Imagine what a different world this would be. If your potent hard member were honored and encouraged by your community perhaps there would be no need for violence. If we loved your cock maybe we would see the end of war. Maybe. Who knows.”
Later, of course, she admits she’s not really advocating street nudity; she just wants to provoke her readers into imagining a world where pleasure was treasured, and to create such a world within themselves.
There’s now a “Masturbate for Peace” website, replete with bumper-sticker designs and silly little jokes n’ puns (and links to Viagra-selling sites). But it also has a more serious tone in its intro:
“We’ve entered a time of wars and rumors of wars. Threats of terrorism and mass destruction have filled the world with fear and brought us perilously close to worldwide conflict. There’s no greater antidote for war than love. Feelings of hatred and distrust form the necessary basis of armed confrontation. Replace those negative feelings with love and you’re halfway towards resolution of any conflict. However, any real love must start from within. You can’t love others without loving yourself first. And, of course, masturbation is the greatest expression of self-love. So it’s natural that we, the citizens of the world, are joining together to masturbate for peace. As we begin with this act of self-love, we encourage others to do the same, to take pleasure in life and to share masturbation’s positive energy with a world in need.”
“We’ve entered a time of wars and rumors of wars. Threats of terrorism and mass destruction have filled the world with fear and brought us perilously close to worldwide conflict.
There’s no greater antidote for war than love. Feelings of hatred and distrust form the necessary basis of armed confrontation. Replace those negative feelings with love and you’re halfway towards resolution of any conflict.
However, any real love must start from within. You can’t love others without loving yourself first. And, of course, masturbation is the greatest expression of self-love. So it’s natural that we, the citizens of the world, are joining together to masturbate for peace.
As we begin with this act of self-love, we encourage others to do the same, to take pleasure in life and to share masturbation’s positive energy with a world in need.”
Of course, I’ll say being joyful to yourself isn’t enough. We must go beyond our own selves, sowing Tears for Fears’s proverbial seeds of love.
SEVERAL OTHERS have had the same idea we expressed here a few weeks back, calling for men to valiantly employ their manhood in the service of peace. F’rinstance, a couple dozen Floridians have joined a “Men for Peace” contingent, organized (natch) by two women, and posed in a nude tableau for pro-peace photos.
MONIKER MADNESS DEPT.: Reader Terry Hickman has a suggestion for our recent rename-the-USA query: Corporatia.
In times of war-mongering fervor, many sadly predictable events regularly recur.
Among them: Essays, usually but not exclusively written by women, blaming essentially the whole male gender for the actions of a few (usually old and un-virile) men who promote the starting of wars. (These stories almost always invoke the phrase “testosterone poisoning” and comparisons of phalluses to guns and missiles.)
One of these, by LA sex-talk-show host Dr. Susan Block, recently appeared in the lefty newsletter CounterPunch. (The above link is to a posting of the article on Block’s own site, which includes images of dildos with Bush and Saddam caricatures drawn on them.)
Just once, I’d like to see a leftist response to war-aggression hype that DIDN’T turn into a wholesale denounciation of het-male sexuality.
For one thing, the current White House occupant isn’t, as Block calls him, a hormone-crazed “dickhead.” If anything he’s a metaphoric castrato, shrilly and obediently (albeit loudly) singing to the moneyed castes in the opera-house luxury boxes.
And as Block has herself written elsewhere on her website, sex and violence are not linked but opposed to one another. A penis is not a missile, a gun, or a torpedo, but biology. It is made to bring joy; to bring people together; to replenish the species, not deplete it. (Though its improper use can lead to heartbreak, broken homes, and STDs.) Cocks have nothing to do with the starting of wars, or at least they haven’t since Troy. (Though as we’ve seen in Kosovo, they can become abused, as weapons of abuse, once a war has commenced.)
I’d like to propose a different vision: Peepees for Peace. Men publicly proclaiming the dedication of their manhood toward “erecting” positive loving alternatives to war-fear, invoking vigor and courage to resist the calls to blind obedience, working alongside (and often-times beneath) all the wise and compassionate women.
This is a little more complicated than the old slogan “Make Love Not War,” but ultimately comes down to the same conclusion. Active love, not passivity, is the true opposite of war (or of fear, one of the key emotional underpinnings of war).
I personally plan to be a warm, firm, blood-filled, snug-fitting, well-lubed, properly-sheathed, rhythmically synchronized advocate for long-term solutions to one of the planet’s most joyless regions. I will use my capacities to help make my nation more responsive to the peace message. And as a writer and public speaker, my fingers and tongue will untiringly pursue procedures which might help lead to a long-lasting, fulfilling resolution.
British scientist Steve Jones (no relation to the ex-Sex Pistols guitarist) claims in his new book Y: The Descent of Men that human males don’t have much of a future. Not only have average sperm counts declined in recent decades, but the Y chromosome itself is slowly but irrevocably devolving into uselessness. The result, as Jones tells Britain’s weekly Observer: “‘The chromosome unique to men is a microscopic metaphor for those who bear it,’ Jones concludes. ‘For it is the most decayed, redundant and parasitic of the lot… From sperm count to social status, and from fertilisation to death, as civilisation advances those who bear Y chromosomes are in relative decline.’… ‘the Y chromosome will eventually disappear and be taken over by another sex-determining mechanism.’
When the Wonderbra was first brought to market, many commentators wagged about when a male equivalent would emerge. Now it has, under the aegis of Britain’s biggest middlebrow clothing-store chain.
LET’S ALL PLAY
SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPE
MYSTERY DATE!
This proposed role-playing game will involve two separately-shuffled decks of cards.
The female player draws a card at random from the Pink Deck to determine which of the following grossly overgeneralized female character types (taken from popular images in “mainstream” and “alternative” media) she must adopt.
Then the male player does the same from the Blue Deck, containing various one-dimensional male character types. The two players then proceed to have a bitter verbal argument, in their characters.
The loser: The player who breaks character first.
The winner: There are no winners.
The point of the game: NOT to have fun, but to be as adamant and as miserable as you can be.
THE FEMALE ROLES:
Description: Says she’ll love you; will really kill or at least totally humiliate you.
Visualization: Blonde, sultry, with a come-hither expression, cleavage, and a knife held behind her back.
Description: Stuck-up high school brat
Visualization: Perfect body, perfect hair, perfect clothes, the facial expression of someone who’s just confronted horse feces on the sidewalk.
Description: Believes stereotyping people by gender is the worst crime in the world, that it’s done by no women and all men, and if you disagree you’re part of the universal male conspiracy.
Visualization: Butch in leather with a permanent scowl.
Description: The emotionally abusive, all-purpose victim of everything. Transforms in an instant from bawling to anxious to wrathful.
Visualization: Overemotive Shakespearean actress; or the couch-swooner from that Edward Gorey book cover. Might be finishing a drink carried in one hand while pouring another drink with her other hand.
Description: Completely lacking a mind or will of her own. Enslaved by TV and magazine ads that don’t want her to buy stuff, just to make her feel miserable.
Visualization: mirror in her hand, standing on a scale, rail-thin but seeing herself in the mirror as voluminously obese
Description: Victim of the Mean Teen’s putdowns for merely looking insufficiently ladylike. Because she has the skankiest reputation in school, no boy will have her–and none ever has.
Visualization: Not seductive, merely “cheap” and semi-pathetic looking. Ill-fitting denim jacket, last year’s jeans style, the wrong brand of cigarettes, too much makeup.
Description: Her mischievous giggle and batting eyes can make men give her fortunes, which she’ll waste in an instant on one really fabulous consumer purchase.
Visualization: Carefully contrived fake absentmindedness.
Description: The woman every man’s supposed to go absolutely crazy about and if you don’t what’s wrong with you?
Visualization: An almost kabuki-like absurdist characterization made from her own thoroughly-surgeried body; plus overbleached and overteased hair, big vacant eyes, surgically-thickened pouting lips, impossibly high heels, and a vinyl or gold-lame jumpsuit.
Description: Diligently works to create a society where everything’s uniformly blah and anything that could even possibly be fun would be outlawed.
Visualization: Stern emotionless behind big round glasses, blah hair, blah clothes,
Description: Your new boss, who uses conniving and treachery to get to the top (whereas your old male boss simply used bluster and bullying).
Visualization: Nordstrom-suited adult version of the Mean Teen. Shoulder pads capable of playing football in.
Description: doesn’t want to kill you, just enslave you.
Visualization: Perect demure smile, bridal gown, holding handcuffs or a lasso, perhaps dreaming a “thought balloon” of screeching children and a minivan.
Description: In high school she was the Mean Teen. In adulthood she will be the Dresser for Success. But now in college, she’s sowing more oats than Quaker–and will voraciously defend her right to do so.
Visualization: Standing up in the back seat of a convertible, either flashing or simply thrusting her bosom forward. Expression of out-of-control glee.
THE MALE ROLES:
Description: Ape-ish, vulgar, boorish, yet boistrously unaware.
Visualization: Abercrombie & Hilfiger designer slop, backward baseball cap, puking while holding a bottle of Goldschlager.
Description: Can’t read, speak, or think. Can barely stand. Yet fantasizes about being a drug-running, woman-beating street tough.
Visualization: Baggy butt-cleavage jeans, blank permanent-stoner expression, skateboard, lanky and hunched over.
Description: Believes in Breaking All The Rules, especially rules that prevent him from doing anything he wants to anything (or anyone) he wants.
Visualization: Loud “GQ” attire, Ray-Bans, smug smirk, cocky strut, posing in front of a huge-ass vehicle with anti-environmental and/or just plain rude bumper stickers.
Description: Wishes for the chance to create, from violence and chaos, a new world of total purity. Doesn’t yet realize such a world would immediately declare him not pure enough.
Visualization: Crew cut, huge-ass gun, stern stare, KKK robe showing beneath his fatigues.
Description: Watches TV and doesn’t read “alternative” newspapers; and hence is personally responsible for everything wrong in the whole world.
Visualization: The vacuous ’50s daddy figure from the cartoon This Modern World.
Description: Exists only to oppress women; dreams of a world where men are men and women stay barefoot & pregnant.
Visualization: Malicious-looking brute with slick hair and a slick thin moustache, in a disco suit with gold chains and a thick mound of fake chest hair.
Description: From man-bashing TV commercials, the clueless househusband who can’t even open a can of beans without a woman to help.
Visualization: Clumsy oaf in the middle of a pratfall.
Description: Believes the only way a male can have a soul is to renounce his body. Eats a special macrobiotic diet devised by Chinese monks to completely suppress the sex drive. Women frequently tell him of their platonic respect for him, in between relationships with Patriarchists.
Visualization: Ponytail down to here; paisley pajama-esque clothes, open-toed Earth Shoes.
Description: The school principal, college professor, company president, court judge, government official, parole officer, doctor, cop, father, banker, or other authority figure whose only joy in life is keeping you down.
Visualization: A sadistic yet somehow blasé expression, a more or less wrinkly face, and a more or less formal business suit.
Description: The perfectly trained mate. Ready and eager to perform any chore (from cunnilingus to grouting) without notice. Will be cheated on within a year and divorced within two.
Visualization: Sweater, tastefully poofy curly blond hair, the expression of a puppy dog eager to please. Perhaps cooking, gardening, or mending socks.
Description: White women see him as a potential stealer of purses. White men see him as a potential stealer of jobs.
Visualization: Thin; dressed in an overly-anxious-to-fit-in looking formal suit. Face is silhouetted (the particular ethnicity of this man, whatever it is, isn’t the point).
Description: Perfect BECAUSE he’s gay and therefore safely unavailable; the object/recipient of female fantasies involving every possible virtue.
Visualization: Perfectly dressed, perfectly groomed, boyish looking (but not queen-y).
The summer print MISC, which was supposed to be out next week, has been delayed; basically because certain freelance contributions have been slow or nonexistent. Think of this as YOUR opportunity. We need your essays, op-eds, and fun facts (800 words or shorter), particularly about the issue’s previously advertised theme: “More Sex, Less Gender.” E-mail for particulars.
TO OUR READERS #2: We get a lot of e-mails from folx who’d like this site to plug their new Net-based audiovisual technology doohickeys. For them, I have a simple six-word response: Wake me when it’s Mac-compatible.
…of our forthcoming “More Sex, Less Gender” print-mag theme, an artist of undisclosed gender discusses the issues relating to distorted Barbies.
ADVENTURES in celebrity name misspellings.
ANOTHER DIGITAL DIVIDE FALLS: More and more women are getting hooked on that onetime geeks-only craze, online gaming.
EXPLORE WILLFULLY-FORGOTTEN MEMORIES of Saturday mornings past at Bad Cartoons of the ’80s.
